- South Korea: Prosecutors seek 30 years for Yoon over drone plot
Source: United Press International
“South Korean prosecutors on Friday sought a 30-year prison sentence for jailed former President Yoon Suk Yeol, alleging he ordered military drones to infiltrate North Korea in a bid to provoke tensions ahead of his short-lived martial law declaration in 2024. A special counsel team led by Cho Eun-suk said Yoon and senior defense officials orchestrated the drone incursions through military command channels to trigger a North Korean response and create a security crisis as justification for emergency rule. The team charged Yoon, former Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun and former Defense Counterintelligence Command chief Yeo In-hyung with offenses including aiding an enemy state and abuse of power.” (04/24/26)
- Judge orders Trump, DOJ to justify why president’s frivolous $10 billion IRS lawsuit should proceed
Source: ABC News
“A federal judge is raising concerns about whether Donald Trump’s attempt to sue the IRS for $10 billion can proceed, signaling she could throw out the case because the president oversees the government entities he is suing. Judge Kathleen Williams raised the issue in an order on Friday denying a request to delay the case amid possible settlement talks. She noted that Trump and the defendants — the Treasury Department and IRS — may not be ‘sufficiently adverse’ to one another for the case to proceed. … Trump, his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., and the Trump Organization filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service and Treasury Department in January related to the unauthorized disclosure of tax information during Trump’s first term. A government contractor with the IRS pleaded guilty in 2023 to stealing the tax information of Donald Trump and other wealthy Americans and leaking it to media outlets in 2019 and 2020.” (04/24/26)
https://abcnews.com/Politics/judge-orders-trump-doj-justify-presidents-10b-irs/story?id=132365447
- China’s DeepSeek releases preview of long-awaited V4 model as AI race intensifies
Source: CNBC
“Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek on Friday released a preview version of its long-awaited V4 large language model, allowing users to test its new capabilities and features. The release comes more than a year after the Hangzhou-based company introduced its R1 reasoning model, which rocked global tech markets due to its surprising performance and cost efficiency. Similar to DeepSeek’s previous model releases, the latest upgrade is open-source, allowing developers to download the code, run it locally and modify it in most cases. … DeepSeek also said that V4 has been optimized for use with popular agent tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenClaw.” (04/24/26)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/24/deepseek-v4-llm-preview-open-source-ai-competition-china.html
- Turns Out, “Unite the Right” Charlottesville Rally was Underwritten by the Left [sic]
Source: Batya Ungar-Sargon
by Batya Ungar-Sargon“An explosive new indictment was handed down against the Southern Poverty Law Center this week, accusing the storied civil rights organization of 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and money laundering. The Department of Justice is alleging that between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled over $3 million from donors to leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, Unite the Right, and the Nazi Party, among other extremist organizations. … Paying millions of dollars to Nazis and Klansmen would be bad enough. But the indictment alleges that the SPLC went beyond that, actually underwriting the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, providing material support and supervision to what the Left turned into the symbol of Right-wing hate.” [editor’s note: Ungar-Sargon does have a little credibility on Charlottesville — on the “right” she was one of the few who didn’t try to perpetrate the “Charlottesville Hoax” Hoax – TLK] (04/26/26)
https://www.batya-us.com/p/for-years-the-left-used-the-unite
- Government Cannot Make Us Healthy
Source: Brownstone Institute
by Mollie Engelhart“[T]he truth is, the government was never going to save us. It was never designed to move faster than the people. It responds to pressure, to markets, and to what we tolerate and what we demand. Right now, we are still funding the very system we say we want to change. The only real power we have is how we spend our money, our time, and our energy, and that power has to be exercised consistently. It is easy to vote one day in November. It is hard to change how we spend our money every single day. It is hard to change how we eat every single day. It is hard to choose, over and over again, to support something different when the system is designed to make the alternative less convenient.” (04/24/26)
https://brownstone.org/articles/government-cannot-make-us-healthy/
- Who is responsible when an AI weapon pulls the trigger?
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Muhammad Saad“In 1863, Francis Lieber, the Prussian-American jurist commissioned by Abraham Lincoln to codify the laws of land warfare, wrote that no soldier may kill an enemy ‘who has laid down his arms.’ War, however brutal, must remain an act performed by a morally responsible agent who can account for what he has done and to whom it has been done. The Lieber Code was imperfect. Its application was racially selective and its humanitarian ambitions frequently betrayed in practice. But its foundational premise survived two world wars, the drafting of the Geneva Conventions and the development of every weapons system from the machine gun to the precision-guided munition. Its premise is that lethal force requires a human being who can be identified, interrogated, and held to account. Today, AI-powered targeting systems fundamentally break this premise.” (04/24/26)
- An All-American Retort to Israel’s Invasion of Lebanon
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Jim Bovard“Israel’s bombing of Lebanon has reportedly killed more than a thousand civilians this year. Israel also drove out more than a half million civilians from southern Lebanon as part of an effort to commandeer that territory. Israel’s bombing has been so indiscriminate that even President Donald Trump objected. … I have the same recommendation now that I had in a 1987 USA Today piece opposing deployment of the U.S. Navy to the Persian Gulf: ‘This is not our war, and there is no profit in U.S. intervention.’ GTFO remains the best Middle East policy for America.” (04/24/26)
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/an-all-american-retort-to-israels-invasion-of-lebanon
- Israel Apologists Lie About Their Feelings And Beliefs
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone“One of the most frustrating things about Israel apologists is how they constantly pretend to believe things they don’t really believe in order to push Israeli PR. There’s a tweet going around by a rabbi named Elchanan Poupko that says ‘I had never met a Zionist who does not care also for the lives of innocent Palestinians. I have never met an anti-zionist who does care for the lives of israelis. That is the difference between us.’ This person does not believe his own claim. He is knowingly lying about what he thinks is true about Zionists. A Penn State survey published in Israeli media last year found that 82 percent of Jewish Israelis support the forced expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza. Nearly half, 47 percent, said the IDF should kill all inhabitants of any city they capture — that’s inhabitants, not combatants.” (04/25/26)
- Our Anti-Rich Tax System
Source: Free Association
by Sheldon Richman“I suspect that, considering how most commentators talk about the matter, many people think the U.S. tax system favors the rich, the public’s favorite scapegoat. But according to Adam N. Michel, the Cato Institute’s director of tax policy studies, ‘We actually have one of the most progressive income taxes in the developed world.’ … The average tax rate on upper-tier earners is as high as 33.4 percent. ‘[A]s a share of adjusted gross income (AGI), the top half of income earners paid 97.1 percent of federal income taxes.’ That leaves less than 3 percent for the rest.” (04/24/26)
https://sheldonrichman.substack.com/p/tgif-who-pays-federal-taxes
- Has Iran Learned the North Korea Lesson: Nukes Are Essential To Deter the US?
Source: Antiwar.com
by Ted Galen Carpenter“The contrast between Washington’s caution in dealing with a nuclear-armed North Korea and the flagrant U.S. coercion of Iran, which possesses no such weapons, could hardly be more striking. It has not gone unnoticed. Pyongyang’s successful defiance of the United States regarding the nuclear issue could well produce an important lesson for Iran’s leaders. Pyongyang has covertly built a small arsenal of approximately 50 nuclear warheads and an increasingly sophisticated fleet of ballistic missiles to deliver them. U.S. and other leaders now treat North Korea with caution and restraint, however grudgingly. Conversely, an Iran without nuclear weapons is being pounded severely. Iranian leaders would be obtuse not to at least try to acquire (through construction or purchase) a modest deterrent similar to North Korea’s.” (04/24/26)
- What We Want and How to Get It
Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob“British-American philosopher Mick Jagger put it best: ‘You can’t always get what you want.’ A universal verity. But what about a sadder situation? ‘You must always get what you don’t want.’ Only the deepest pessimist thinks this pertains to our lives, our ‘lived experience’ in even these our mixed-up times. But it does apply to one huge domain of life: our representation in Congress.” (04/24/26)
- Left’s war on SCOTUS just hit a terrifying new low
Source: Fox News
by John Yoo“Last week, The New York Times divulged a fresh trove of confidential internal memoranda between the Supreme Court justices. The documents allegedly show that Chief Justice John Roberts and his conservative colleagues have abused the Court’s technical procedures to block the agenda of Democratic presidents and to favor Republicans. While this accusation can only succeed by ignoring the broader context of the Court’s work, it heralds the latest progressive attack on the Court as a stabilizing institution in our national politics.” (04/25/26)
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/john-yoo-lefts-war-supreme-court-hit-terrifying-new-low
- Congress Still Has a Chance To Curb Section 702 Surveillance Abuses
Source: Reason
by JD Tuccille“With Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, President Donald Trump’s reversal from opponent to supporter of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) seemed certain to guarantee renewal of the law. That’s not what happened. Instead, Section 702 of the controversial spying legislation won only a temporary extension, to April 30, as civil libertarians and surveillance-state supporters from both major parties continue to battle. Hopefully, the outcome is the long-deserved demise of surveillance practices that threaten the privacy of Americans.” (04/24/26)
https://reason.com/2026/04/24/congress-still-has-a-chance-to-curb-section-702-surveillance-abuses/
- The Pontiff and the Postliberals
Source: Law & Liberty
by James M Patterson“There is a deep irony in [Sohrab] Ahmari’s position. He is distressed by the American right’s hostility to Pope Leo. But he has aligned himself with the Catholic sub-group that is least able to reconcile itself to the pope’s anti-war position. Modern popes have for some time been deeply critical of militant global powers, and great powers tend to push back against those critiques. But the patriotic, pro-inclusion thinkers Ahmari despises (like Murray, Neuhaus, and Novak) warmly welcomed the Church’s move away from forms of authoritarian nationalism that repeatedly led to state oppression and war. Ahmari and the postliberals are the ones actively trying to reinvigorate those forms of political theology, despite ample empirical evidence that they tend to breed violence and hatred.” (04/24/26)
- He Wrote an Op-Ed. Then Police Tracked Him
Source: The Daily Economy
by Patrick Carroll“A legal case in Kansas shows how surveillance technology can distort policing priorities. When authorities can monitor anyone cheaply, the temptation to target critics increases.” (04/24/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/he-wrote-an-op-ed-then-police-tracked-him/
- Blame John Roberts for This Anti-Democratic Redistricting War
Source: Common Dreams
by Miles Mogulescu“In the short run, Democrats’ victory in gerrymandering Virginia to create four new blue Congressional districts is a good thing. It will restore balance to the critical 2026 House elections to offset Republicans’ Texas gerrymandering which created four new red districts. President Donald Trump was technically right when the night before the Virginia vote he told a conference of supporters, ‘I don’t know if you know what gerrymandering is but it’s not good.’ Of course what Trump really meant is that gerrymandering is bad when it disenfranchises Republicans but good when it disenfranchises Democrats. Here’s what we do know: partisan gerrymandering is an affront to democracy by letting politicians pick their voters instead of voters picking their politicians.” (04/26/26)
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/john-roberts-gerrymandering
- How the Iran War Makes China Look Good
Source: The American Conservative
by Ted Snider“The foundation of international trust has cracked, and partnerships have been broken. The world can no longer trust the United States. The bond between Europe and the U.S. has been frayed. And the hard-won emerging trust between Iran and its Gulf neighbors, which had held the hope of a safer region, has been badly wounded. There are only losers in this war: the Gulf states, Ukraine, America, and, of course, the Iranian people. An important long-term geopolitical loss suffered by the U.S. is the accelerated erosion of its hegemony and the continued transfer of trust to China.” (04/24/26)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-the-iran-war-makes-china-look-good/
- The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan, 04/24/26
Source: The Weekly Dish
“Greg Lukianoff On Free Speech Fights.” (04/24/26)
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/greg-lukianoff-on-free-speech-fights
- Serious Trouble, 04/24/26
Source: Serious Trouble
“Laura Loomer and Kash Patel lose their defamation suits, but Patel has filed a new one; a former Capitol police officer sues The Blaze for accusing her of being the pipe bomber; SPLC is indicted.” (04/24/26)
https://www.serioustrouble.show/p/this-episode-contains-no-administrative
- The Evil Within, episode 8
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
“The Monetary System.” (04/24/26)
- Soho Forum Debate: Can Zohran Mamdani Make NYC Affordable?
Source: Reason
“Fordham Law School professor Zephyr Teachout and the Manhattan Institute’s John Ketcham debate the resolution, ‘Mayor Zohran Mamdani is likely to fulfill his campaign pledge to make New York City more affordable for most residents.'” (04/24/26)
https://reason.com/podcast/2026/04/24/can-zohran-mamdani-make-nyc-affordable/
- The Bryan Hyde Show, 04/24/26
Source: The Bryan Hyde Show
“Our interactions with others are based on one of two things: persuasion or force. If you want to make persuasion your superpower, you need to hear the message of my guest Joshua Bandoch. He’s the author of ‘How To Get What You Want: Mastering the Art and Science of Persuasion.'” (04/24/26)